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Recently I was watching Victor Wooten‘s great instructional video. He helps to understand music from a totally different perspective, as a form of storytelling. Great workshop with great ideas by one of the best bass players of all times. Watching it changed my way of playing the guitar all of a sudden. It’s amazing and highly inspirational. Make sure to watch the trailer above.

What he says seems so obvious once you’ve got it. Music is a language, and you better tell stories instead of combining meaningless phrases without any content. (Diatonic) scales are highly overrated. Next to each “wrong” note there’s a right note on either side. Like on the piano, where you have two white keys next to each black one. And even the “wrong” notes can sound awesome, if played in an appropriate way. Another highly important lesson to learn is that groove is key. Never lose the rhythm in order to find a note. So true, not only for bass players but for every musician. And there’s much more to learn from this video. In my eyes many ideas apply not just to music but to all things creative. Watch it, it’s great.

There’s gRaphaël, a charting extension based on the library, really neat and useful software. The only drawback I experienced was that it didn’t work perfectly on my iPhone’s Safari — at least a few weeks ago, maybe it does today. Make sure to try out all the demos!

Then there’s the Effect Game Engine, a web based 2D game engine and toolkit.

Combine all of these technologies with HTML5 for audio and video and hell, who needs Flash?

Download the PDF: “Ein Konzept zur Unterstützung menschlicher Spieler in Browserspielen“

Tab-completion in ZSH

About two weeks ago I stumbled upon an article “zsh: The last shell you’ll ever need!” which made me curious about ZSH.

After reading through a couple of articles on the subject I finally switched an was a bit disappointed because of the not so fancy defaults. Quickly I discovered Matt Forster’s zshkit, an awesome set of customized config scripts, that I am using now (slighty altered to my needs).

So what can ZSH do for you? The most popular feature of ZSH is Tab-completion, which is much cooler than bash_completion (see screenshot). For example write ls and press TAB. You will now see a list of possible directories to list. Nothing new so far, except that the prompt stays where it is, the window wont scroll down, and the suggested entries are listed below the command line, which I like much better. Now press TAB a second time. Now the first entry in the list will be highlighted. You can browse through the possible completions using TAB and/or the four arrow keys. This works fine with options, hosts and other commands (eg. kill) as well as with remote command invocation (over ssh).

There are so many other great features and overall using zsh feels much snappier than bash (with all of these nifty features turned on). I highly recommend trying out ZSH in combination with Matt Forster’s zshkit, as it makes my daily work easier and much more fun.

Details, Lineup, Tickets, Programm: http://www.treburopenair.de.

Click here to play/download.

Wir freuen uns auf Euch!

I’m absolutely happy with 1.5 for years now, but I’m really curious about the 2.0 improvements and features. Thanks for the status report, Allan, and keep up the great work!